Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence as the Greatest Weight
Time as an Antidote to Nihilism
“Posthumous men – for example I – are not understood as well as men who reflect their own age, but they are heard with more respect. To be exact: we are never understood – hence our authority.” (KSA 6, 61).
Introduction
“6000 feet beyond man and time” (KSA 6, 335) the eternal recurrence of the same appeared to Nietzsche in a vision. It is a thought of such weight and tragedy, so demanding and almost ungraspable that one immediately may want to denigrate it. Someone’s reaction upon hearing it the first time may be one of fear of endless boredom as nothing new would ever occur in it. It seems to be a thought that is harmful to life, threatening such ideas as progress or improvement. A menace to life, a negation of everything we can observe around us, everything common sense will hold up as true. Although the eternal recurrence of the same appeared to Nietzsche so far beyond man and time, the sole reason why it revealed itself to him, is man and his standing in time, in life. With his doctrine, Nietzsche demands the most of us as human beings. A doctrine that cannot – shall not – be explained by common sense. Were common sense ever to become a philosophical argument, philosophy would come to an end (Gadamer, 2010). Therefore, it is a thought as the eternal recurrence of the same, it is such a doctrine, which raises Nietzsche to truly being a philosopher. Nietzsche, the philologist, who did not have a formal education in philosophy, was rather ignored as a thinker during his (conscious) life.
The eternal recurrence of the same is a philosophical problem, which concerns us, since it asks for nothing less than the origin of the world. It has to concern us even though the question appears to be answered by the natural sciences (and seemingly accepted as true by common sense) with theories as of the Big Bang – de facto in itself a theological theory, which calls the creator God, or the creator spiritus, simply a big explosion in the beginning. The end of the world is then a necessity – a logical necessity – since it moves towards a certain destination: the purpose of the world is to be burnt by the dying sun. Compared to the biblical apocalypse, this scenario does not really depict a more pleasant imagination, rather it shows the groundless nature of such thinking: nihilism. Nietzsche had certainly understood the nihilistic consequences of such theories (KSA 12, 126). He saw the nihilistic trait at the heart of modern natural sciences’ view of the world. Out of them stems nothing but ‘self-destruction, it turns against itself’ (ibidem). Assuming the Big Bang and projecting the end of planet earth as a telos is not only overcome Christian moral thinking in disguise, but it is also deeply life-denying (lebensverneinend in German), as it depicts an absolute justification for the meaninglessness of life. If the end of the world is projected in such a way, without any higher justifying authority (the dictum God is dead is valid), nothing has any weight at all – everything is sinnlos (meaningless). For this very reason Nietzsche proposes – in private quite fearful at first, as Lou Salomé noted (1894; in French translation of 2004) – the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same as the greatest weight.